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Sarah Deardorff Miller, Lessons from the Global Public Policy Literature for the Study of Global Refugee Policy, Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 27, Issue 4, December 2014, Pages 495–513, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feu027
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Introduction
This review examines the literature on Global Public Policy (GPP) to identify concepts, themes and debates that might help inform the study of Global Refugee Policy (GRP). It specifically considers GPP’s focus on non-state actors, its attention to processes of contestation and norms, and its starting assumptions of globalization and interdependence. In spite of unanswered questions and challenges, including the critique that GPP only offers new descriptive labels rather than an explanatory model, the review suggests that GPP may provide a useful approach for the future study of global refugee policy processes. Not only does GPP offer a working definition of ‘global policy’, it also helps to systematize and organize policy processes that include diverse actors and evolving issue-areas, and identify the types of questions future research on GRP might ask.1
Although a literature on GPP has existed since at least the mid-1980s (Soroos 1986), it has yet to be applied to the process by which refugee policy is made at the global level, as distinct from national refugee policy. As outlined in this review, however, GPP literature can make a useful contribution to the study of GRP by offering a framework developed in response to global policy in multiple issue areas, and organizing some of the complex processes at work in the global refugee regime. Moreover, the approach offered by the GPP literature helps specify the context, actors and venues of GRP, unpacking who is involved in making refugee policy, how it is made, where it tends to be made, and in what context. While GPP is not a substitute for related areas of research in refugee and forced migration studies, such as global refugee governance, it does help bring clarity, organization and framing to the contested concept of refugee policy existing at a global level.
